Six Apart’s Anil Dash has announced the release of Movable Type 4.0 (MT), the latest version of the pioneering blogging platform. While the publishing platform has lost a lot of ground to WordPress in the last few years, MT is fighting back by open-sourcing much of its code, offering a free version, and bringing its feature set up to par with WordPress.

The MT4 core comes with advanced features built-in, including tagging and podcasting support.

Here are the highlights of the new version:

• A redesigned user interface.
• More powerful publishing abilities. There‚Äôs support for standalone pages in addition to blog entries, more robust templating, and smarter archiving, with the ability to create archives per-author or category archives paged by month.
• Better plugins, with many built in. Many of the most popular plugins have been folded into the MT4 core, and dozens more plugins are either upgraded for or brand-new to MT4.
• Unique features. Support for an unlimited number of blogs, with the ability to aggregate content from one, some, or all of your blogs in a single page. And the ability to add on solutions to your core MT install to enable Enterprise integration or advanced Community features.
• A reinvigorated community. Six Apart is working to leverage the strength of the MT community with open-source development and a MT Plugins Directory.

The Movable Type site has a list of new features.

If you’re using MT 4 for podcasting, let us know what you think about it in the comments!